Generally, electrostatic chucks may be used during the processing of semiconductor wafers in order to hold and transport semiconductor wafers and their carriers. Electrostatic chucks, as opposed to mechanical chucks that hold wafers by simply acting as a physical clamp, hold a wafer and carrier by applying a charge to a plate and generating an electrostatic force to hold the semiconductor wafer. Such an arrangement allows the electrostatic chuck to avoid contact with the side of the wafer to be processed (a contact which is unavoidable with typical clamping mechanical chucks), thereby preventing damage from occurring on that side of the wafer.
However, as the thickness of semiconductor wafers has been reduced in recent years, especially with the advent of through-substrate vias and the need for thinner semiconductor wafers, electrostatic chucks have run into a problem. Namely, the thinner wafers usually utilize an isolative carrier (e.g., glass) in order to help support the thinner semiconductor wafer structure. However, with the isolative carrier providing little coulombic forces itself and the thinner semiconductor wafers providing less coloumbic forces than the previous thicker wafers, these wafers and carriers require larger and larger bias voltages in order to provide enough of an attractive force between the electrostatic chuck and the wafer/carrier combination to actually hold the wafer/carrier combination to the chuck. However, such a large bias voltage not only increases the cost of production by requiring more energy, but may also damage the semiconductor wafer during processing.